An electrician who was stranded for more than six hours inside a 130-foot-tall sign at an Illinois gas station had recorded a final goodbye to his wife and children because he was so terrified he wouldn’t make it out alive. AJ Gow became trapped inside the stifling, swinging sign last month after his elevator malfunctioned while he was working on it at the Wilmington station, about an hour southwest of Chicago. “At that point, it was getting complicated. I mean, it was getting… I was really getting scared and I didn’t know what was going to happen. And yeah, I was going crazy,” he recalled to ABC 7 Chicago. Gow gave a news helicopter the thumbs up when it got stuck last month. WLS “God forbid something really happened; they were my last words. Basically, a goodbye without saying goodbye,” he said of the messages he recorded to them. Gow, who works for a company that provides signage services, said what started as a routine job on July 23 quickly turned into a potential tragedy. “It was a hot day. There was really no air, so I sent my coworker over. I said, ‘Go get me some water and my battery-powered fan,'” Gow told the outlet. “He went down and on the way back he had a problem and couldn’t get back,” Gow said. While he was not initially concerned, his condition began to deteriorate after approximately four hours inside the narrow sign with no water. Meanwhile, on the ground, efforts to fix the elevator repeatedly failed. Gow was taken to safety after more than six hours trapped in the sign. Wilmington Fire Protection District / Facebook “Eventually I started to feel terrible. And I told him [my co-worker]You know, call EMS. I said, I don’t care what you have to do, put me down,” Gow said. Fire crews rushed to the scene, but their ladders were only 100 feet high and they couldn’t reach him. Eventually, authorities arranged another transport from a work site about 17 miles away. Feeling reinvigorated when the elevator arrived at the scene with a police escort, Gow gave a thumbs up to a local news helicopter. The clip and his story immediately went viral. Gow He recorded final messages to his wife and children after a mechanical failure left him fearing for his life during the six-hour ordeal. Facebook/AJ Gow “I wasn’t prepared for it to get as much traction as it did,” Gow said. “I had no idea he was going to be stuck here for so long, or that he was going to be anywhere near that type of scenario.” He returned to work fixing electrical signs, adding that he is grateful to be able to look back on the terrifying situation and “laugh about it,” and will make sure to always stay inside his lift bucket.
